This is certainly a shocker to me. I thought the BLS was an upstanding governmental organization of the highest standards and ethics. How could anyone question their numbers?
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/03/2015 12:22 -0500
The biggest threat to a corrupt regime is when truth moves away from the “conspiracy theory” fringes and into the mainstream. Which is why we thank Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, for daring to tell the truth to those who care to listen.
Posted first on LinkedIn
The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment
Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.
Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.
None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.
There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.
Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find — in other words, you are severely underemployed — the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.
There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.
And it’s a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual’s primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity — it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen’s talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream.
Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America’s middle class.
I hear all the time that “unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.” When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth — the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real — then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t “feeling” something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class.
***
And since we never tired of showing the “job recovery“, here is what Clifton is talking about visually.
The Founding Fathers fought for freedom of speech. Little good does it do when the general populace is drugged out on sports / iCrap / video games. The government can lie with impunity, and you can show it’s a lie – but nobody cares. What’s freedom of speech worth – when no one listens?
I am having less and less faith in a 4th turning and the mindless millennia. generation.
When a populace is overwhelmed with alcohol, drugs, sports, entertainment, lousy education system, failing parents, and daily government and media propaganda (brainwashing), most people who don’t have the common sense and curiosity to ferret out the truth end up as nothing more than compliant, subservient, slaves.
This is as the Ruling Class and big money special interests want it.
All one needs to do is drive into any decent size city and look around. Conservatively, the unemployment rate is 25%. If one digs deeper they may find in large sections of major cities upwards of 50% unemployment. I may even be underestimating this. How anyone with half a brain can believe that the unemployment rate in the country is 5.6% is beyond me. Out.
Ruling Class control of the “news” media, along with their control of the Infotainment Machine, virtually guarantees that the Muppets will never mount any effective opposition to the plans of the Ruling Class for transferring sovereignty from the citizen sovereigns to the more “enlightened” and obviously heroic Ruling Class monsters and their idiot children, and into perpetuity. That way the world can be made perfectly “fair”. Er, I mean as long as the enlightened more-equal-than-others Ruling Class monsters get their way!
The H1B visa program will help dispatch the upper end of the middle class while Obamesiahcare guts the rest and forces them into competition for the crumbs with disease ridden and unskilled illegal “heroes”.
Oh what an “enlightened” campaign of deception and misdirection the servants of the Ruling Class engage in for their paymasters and handlers!
Nothing that comes out of Warshington is the truth. Nothing. I used to believe the military was honorable and somewhat honest, but after watching “Admiral Kirby” dispense his flavor of bullshit, I’ve added the military to the list of fucking liars.
Many of our ‘fellow’ citizens are so fucked up they have shit for brains:
Woman with kangaroo service animal asked to leave McDonald’s following complaint
Officer Rich Dahl responded to an anonymous complaint about a woman who brought a kangaroo into McDonald’s. Dahl said Tuesday the woman had the baby kangaroo wrapped in a blanket and tucked in an infant car seat.
Dahl says when he confronted the woman she explained the kangaroo was a service animal to help her cope with emotional distress and she produced a letter from a doctor.
http://www.channel3000.com/news/Woman-with-kangaroo-asked-to-leave-McDonald-s/31070084
This person is taking up valuable oxygen. And what doctor writes a letter for a kangaroo? Nobody from the government needs to lie – the damage has already bee done.
Ragman….read “War Is A Rackett”…..Then you’ll know that little the military does is for freedom.
Jim…you’re wrong. The economy is strong and unemployment is low…..just ask the Demorats and Emperor Obozo.
I wonder if Mr. Clifton will be “accidented” in the near future”
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
My sister-in-law: “The newspeople say that the economy is great and that unemployment is down, so the country is in great shape!”.
“My sister-in-law: “The newspeople say that the economy is great and that unemployment is down, so the country is in great shape!”.”
—-llpoh
You’re gonna need another sister-in-law.
“Ragman….read “War Is A Rackett”…..Then you’ll know that little the military does is for freedom.”
—-Buckhed
And Buckwheat’s solution is?
Dutch, I think the 4th turning will be so bad people won’t have time for their bullshit addictions. They will either learn to survive or perish. Those who can produce and think will survive and eventually prosper. In the interim it is going to suck. Sports and games and iPods can’t overcome the laws of nature.
Llpoh
My sister-in-law was a deluded sheep at one time, then something clicked and the light bulb over her head came on. Don’t give up hope. Of coarse, financial collapse and starvation would prolly give her a clue that things are not rosey.
Commentators Disease is the ruin of the Republic.Blue collar workers need blue collar jobs and no amount of free community college on earth will change that fact.
Often the reason Johntavious can’t read is because Johntavious hasn’t the cognitive wherewithal to absorb the process.
Free trade isn’t free if the working class of one’s nation has no work.
Commentator’s Disease
Letting Them Eat Cake
Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal. Not even close. Further, people with barely a high-school education and low-voltage minds regard any intellectual task with utter discouragement.
Some commentators urge letting people invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf, Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.
Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it.
The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.
Which is easy to do. A girl marries her high-school sweetheart in Busted Hump, Tennessee and he goes to work for the local pickle-bottling plant, which switches to hiring people as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. Neither of the pair is real bright, just ordinary Americans trying to make a living. They live paycheck to paycheck because they don’t know how not to. Neither is lazy. They just don’t know how to start the next Microsoft. He dies of a heart attack at 45, she can’t make the mortgage, and…she is well and truly screwed.
At the Zoo Bar, they have great wings and some really good walk-in blues bands, and what you have to understand about Keynes is….
Commentator’s Disease.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTW0y6kazWM
More free trade please.
Yes, 40 million Americans are on food stamps, 100 million are not even officially in the labor force, and perhaps as much as most Americans are receiving some sort of government assistance, but that doesn’t make it socialism. It makes it a failed capitalist system. Socialism is supposed to be about a society that cares, and that’s not what those US government handouts are about. They’re about keeping people quiet in a failed system.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-03/it-socialism-or-just-failure
We the people export American manufacturing to Mexico whilst in return Mexico exports hordes of impoverished humanity into the USSA. Sound like a fair trade to me. We get the cheap goods from Mexico and get to support their FSA as well…win win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5etqzvFrP60
2015-02-04 07:30 by Karl Denninger
Of Course It’s A Big Lie
If you’ve read my employment reporting for the last several years you already know this.
Gallup has been talking about it too, but this is a particularly poignant reminder.
Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.
Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.
Of course. The facts don’t matter; all that matters is that the stock market continues to go up and Obama isn’t drummed out of office and then run out of the country on a rail. Between government gimmes and outright lies about the economy the orchestration has been stunning in both scale and scope.
But as I’ve pointed out the simple math is something else entirely. Yes, there are 2 million more people working now than there were when the unemployment rate first went over 6% in 2008.
However, there are 15 million more working-age people in the country.
One of the “big lies” is that the population is getting older and thus not working any more. That’s a lie too. Of those who are over 65 want a job and are not disabled the unemployment rate is under 4%.
No other portion of the population is doing as well.
I hear all the time that “unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.” When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth — the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real — then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t “feeling” something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class.
Well, no on the latter.
What hollowed out the middle class is pretty simple too, but nobody will talk about that either. Unbridled unlawful immigration and exporting our jobs to effective slave labor nations in the name of “free trade” did that. Oh, by the way, they want to do more of that too — the “Trans Pacific Partnership” is the latest incantation.
You’re not going to stop that one either are you America?
Nope, you’re not, just like you won’t stop the illegal immigration and you won’t stop the offshoring. Hell, you won’t even stop buying iCrap made in sweatshops over in China; that iCrap is far more important to you than whether you, or your neighbor, has a good job.
We deserve what’s coming and we have in fact done it to ourselves.